Sainsbury on Thinking about Fictional Things

Abstract

In a number of places Mark Sainsbury has recently developed an attractive irrealist account of fiction and intentionality, on which there are no fictional objects or exotic intentional entities. A central component of his account is an ambitious argument, which aims to establish that the truth of intensional transitives such as “I think about Holmes” and “Alexander feared Zeus” does not require the existence of fictional or intentional objects. It would be good news indeed for the irrealist if Sainsbury’s argument worked. However, I argue that Sainsbury’s argument fails. I conclude by considering how Sainsbury’s irrealist might explain our intuitions about such sentences, drawing upon another component of Sainsbury’s irrealism.